Ah, the facade of Victorian morality. What a jest.

It was a wonderful time for someone like him to be alive. Someone who didn't believe the innate nature of humans was anything more than self-serving. He had seen very little goodness in his life. But then he had been the furthest from kind or good himself.

Every day he was confronted with man's startling avarice. And nowhere on earth was the confirmation of mankind's selfish, pleasure-seeking ways more evident than in London, among the aristocracy's elite.

Behind fluttering silk fans, and beyond the fashionable ballrooms where champagne and polite conversation flowed, lay a cesspool of immorality and vice. It was this dichotomy that Matthew found so amusing. He enjoyed watching the members of the nobility feverishly working to implement the queen's moral views on religion, family and sex. These were the men who married, fathered children and touted the merits of the married state thither and yon. They were the leaders whom the queen respected, whom she believed in. The ones who championed social reform, who rallied vigorously and vocally at parliament to keep the whores off the street and sex buried beneath a cloak of piety. It was these